Charlie Mulholland came to the MediaLAB to teach about brainstorming. He told that, according to the creative process-model of Tassoul, you are dealing with divergent and convergent thinking during the development of a project: in the first phase you are exploring a lot of information and theories, and in the second phase you will have to select the best ones to come to one clear point again. Un important aspect of brainstorming is that in most cases you are dealing with a ‘wicked problem’: a problem that is ill-defined. Therefore the first step is to know exactly what the problem is. While redefining the problem in your own words you can also look at the answers that don’t help. By this you can make your vision broader and see the problem from a different perspective. The next step is to decide who the stakeholders are. Come up with as much stakeholders as possible. Don’t be critical, just write them down!
So let’s use this model for our project, the Agavestraat. According to the Light Challenge 2013 the problem is that the lighting is not sustainable and innovative enough, and it never included any participation with the residents. If you take this problem in consideration once more, a logical question is: are these also the problems of the residents or do they have different issues? During our first meeting in Almere the residents told us that they do not always have a save feeling in the street, and for some people the street light is shining too powerful into their houses. When taking all this information together (convergent thinking), maybe we can come up with a better definition of the problem, for example: how can we renew the streetlight in the Agavestraat to be more sustainable and meaningful for the residents? In that way we captured the term ‘innovation’ in ‘renew’, sustainable is in this definition and in ‘meaningful’ the elements of savety and light-effectivity for the residents are included.
What are the negative ideas that won’t give a solution? Using a lot of light will certainly not be the right answer, because that doesn’t automatically make the street saver, and people will have too much light shining into their houses. Also we can’t use too much energy, because the government will have to spend too much money.
Who are our stakeholders? The most important ones are of course the residents, the Light Challenge and the municipality. But besides these three we can come up with more parties: ourselves, MediaLAB, companies that make material for street lights, investors, light artists, other visitors of the Agavestraat, people who leave nearby, animals, police and journalists.
